Ryan (Mallick Brothers #2)(9)

Women.

She didn't want to interrupt if I had company of the female variety.

And I swear to fuck I was seconds away from claiming that would never happen just so her pretty little face would come to my door. But fact of the matter was, no matter her little strides, I couldn't see her all of a sudden being just a fully functioning person ready for a relationship anytime soon. While I might have been patient and wasn't ruled by my goddamn sex drive, I didn't see anything happening with us that way.

But I could hope for a friendship at least.

So I couldn't make promises about never dating. Because while my brothers were right and I was in a dry spell, I knew that eventually, I would find a woman in my travels and take her to bed again.

"Door is always open, honey," I said instead, knowing that it was the best I could give her.

"Okay," she said, giving me a false smile and motioning out to her living room. "Do you want to sit down? A Christmas Story is on. You know... on a loop for the rest of the night because you can never get too much of A Christmas Story."

"Sure," I said, grabbing the glasses and the bottles and moving over to her living area where there was only one place to sit.

And it was a small couch.

And she was going to be plastered to me on it.

Oh, yeah, stepping across the hall had been the best idea I'd had in a long fucking time.





SIX





Dusty





So... he was in my apartment.

No reason to completely lose my cool.

Except he was in my apartment in his perfect gray suit and red tie and nice watch and perfectly mussed hair and scruffy face and gorgeous eyes and his sweet smile and his fancy bottle of wine.

That seemed like a pretty legit reason to freak, didn't it?

Since the night of the alarm, I had been up and down. One day, bordering on depressed, the next somewhat hopeful. It was an unusual pattern for me that my therapist had picked up on easily and poked and prodded me about until she finally got answers about it.

And I gave her it all.

From the fact that I kinda watched Ryan to him saying hi one day to him forcibly carrying me and Rocky to safety and patching my hand and all that was in between, every tiny detail that kept me up at night and ran across my mind all day as well.

She had paused for a long moment after, watching me across the video chat with dark eyes I couldn't read.

Then she had told me that it was really only appropriate to get him a thank you gift.



       
         
       
        

At the time, I thought she was just reminding me of basic social norms. It wasn't until after the package arrived and I was sitting on my floor wrapping it that I realized her motives had been ulterior.

She wanted me to drop it off.

She knew that I would never ask my uncle to do it because then he would ask why and he would read way too much into it, get that hopeful look in his eyes that I knew I would only dash when I didn't magically get better and become a social butterfly who had a steady boyfriend and a life again.

She knew I would have to do it myself.

I had to give it to her, it was a good move.

And, after talking myself into it all morning, then listening for him to leave, it was a successful one.

Because I darted across the hall, placed the present, then flew back into my apartment to deal with the panic attack in private.

But it never came.

I slammed my door and locked it and pressed back against it and... nothing. My heart was pounding from the mad dash, not panic.

Which was something I mulled over for hours until my uncle showed up and we had dinner and opened presents and then he offered me a goodbye before heading off to go visit a few of his bachelor buddies.

The absolute last thing I expected that evening was a knock at my door.

I had been in my room getting ready for bed when it came, making my heart shoot up into my throat as I froze. No one knocked on my door. Except Bry and Bry wasn't supposed to come over until the day before New Years Eve. My hand went to my throat as I padded barefoot across my apartment and looked out the peep to find Ryan standing there, looking a little tired, but happy and stupidly perfect.

I hadn't had anyone but Bry and Carl and my Uncle Danny in my apartment in, well, a long, long time. It was weird to stand there, wondering what he thought of the place as he looked around. But he was perfectly as ease, making himself at home, uncorking the wine, and demanding cookies.

His ease put me a little more at ease myself.

Which was the only possible explanation as to why I had invited him to watch a movie with me on my itty bitty Barbie couch. It was plenty big for me even when I stretched out on it. But Ryan was a big guy and, well, he took up more than his fair half.

That meant when he sat down, his body was literally touching mine from shoulder to knee, me having my legs criss-crossed and still fitting fully on my own side. His body heat radiated through his layers of clothing, a comforting kind of warmth that I found myself enjoying way too much.

He sat forward, pouring the wine, then sat back and half turned to me to offer me my glass. I reached for it, finding our hands brushed yet again and, well, once was an accident, several times was by design. He was purposely touching me.

That, well, yeah, that was... nice? 

It felt nice. That was really all that mattered, wasn't it?

He sat back and raised his glass to me. "What are we drinking to?" I asked. "Your Herculean strength, perhaps?"

He snorted at that. "Please. You weigh about as much as your cat."

"Then, ah, to new friendships?" I asked a little hopefully, praying it didn't come off as desperate, though a part of me was most definitely desperate.

He watched me a long moment, his light eyes unreadable. "No. No, I don't think we should drink to that either."

"Well, I'm out then. You pick."

His lips tipped up slightly, not quite a smile, but something hinting at it. "Here's to progress," he offered, the words a little heavy and I wanted badly to read into it, but I forced myself to accept it at face value, clink my glass to his, and take a sip.

Having never had seventy dollar wine before, personally considering a thirty dollar bottle pretty good stuff, I hadn't known why there were such things as wine snobs. But his wine? Yeah, it was amazing.

"Oh my God," I half-groaned as I sat back against the couch.

"Sufficient price of admission?" he asked, watching me.

"With this, I wouldn't even be mad if your motive was to come in here and rob me."

"The only thing I'm stealing is more of those Polish cookies of yours," he said and I realized I had left them in the kitchen.

"Oh, right," I said, moving to bolt off the couch only to find his large palm pressing down on my thigh right above my knee, firm and unyielding, keeping me in place.

"Relax. I'll grab them," he said, pressing upward and moving across my apartment to do just that. He placed them down on the table then reached up to remove his suit jacket, leaving him in a very well tailored dark gray dress shirt with matte buttons.

"What do you do?" I found myself blurting out.

One of his brows rose slightly. "I own a couple businesses," he offered but, if I wasn't mistaken, there was a bit of a guardedness to his tone.

"Huh, maybe I order from you," I said with a smile, motioning toward where I had a few shipping boxes piled under my mail table.

"Not likely," he said, sitting back down and, I kid you not, putting his hand right back down on my thigh again like it was the most casual thing in the world. Like we sat that way all the time. "I own a jewelry store, an office building, a contracting business, part of a bar and, recently, the women's shelter."

"You own the women's shelter?" I asked immediately, it being the most interesting of the bunch.

"Just recently," he said with a shrug. "They were having financial issues in the beginning stages and because my brothers' women and my mom are all involved in it in various ways, we decided we needed to step in. I just happened to be in a better position to take it on than my brothers."

He struck me as the type to be good with money. We lived in a nice apartment building and while I knew he had made major adjustments to his apartment when he first moved in, it wasn't one of the most expensive in the area. He wore nice suits and watches, but he wasn't constantly having purchases delivered or bringing home bags of stuff.

He seemed married to his work.

Men like that usually had money to throw around on seventy dollar bottles of wine.

Even before the agoraphobia, on a teacher's salary, all that stuff was a pipe dream.

Besides, I was raised frugally. I wasn't materialistic.

"That is very... philanthropic of you."

"They do good things there," he said, shrugging it off.

They did more than good things. They changed lives. Owning it, having his family involved in it, he must have known that. When I read in the paper that they were building it, my first thought had been- it's about time. Growing up, moving around the way we always did, I had seen more than my fair share of battered women. And Navesink Bank had the added awfulness of men like Lex Keith and his God-awful track record with women to deal with.